American Blonde by Jennifer Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

cocked, cigarette in one hand. He was a dapper, balding man, trim in a handsome gray suit with a lavender pocket handkerchief.
    “A natural beauty. Good coloring.” His assistant followed him, making notes. Mr. Guilaroff gestured as he talked, waving the cigarette like a baton. He came forward and touched my hair, holding the ends, examining the color and the feel of it. “It’s too curly. We can give it a wave, which will take some of that out, control it more. The hairline is good. I don’t think we’ll have to lift it. The cut is terrible.” For the first time, he spoke to me directly: “Who did this to you?”
    I had done it to myself, in a bathroom in Paris, with a set of cutting shears loaned to me by a family from the French Resistance. “I did.”
    He frowned. “The color too, I see.” He moved behind me and set his hands on my shoulders. He studied my reflection for about three minutes. “You’re an American hero, are you not, Miss Hart?” Before I could answer, he snapped his fingers at his assistant, and said something to her about color number this, and number such-and-such and so-and-so. She wrote everything down, nodding so hard I thought her head would snap off. He beamed at me in the mirror. “What do you think . . . of
blonde
?”
    Mudge arrived before I was done. She dropped her mink onto a chair and lit a cigarette. She said hello to Sydney, hello to Arlene Dahl, hello to Phoebe Phillips. She stood chatting with Sydney, watching him work.
    Afterward, when he was finished, Mudge inspected my head from every angle. “Sydney, you’re inspired. It’s the hair she should have been born with. What do you call it?”
    “Blonde.”
    “Not just any blonde, darling.” She winked at me. “
American
blonde.”

    Miss Burns taught drama, Miss Bates taught ballet and movement, and Miss Fogler taught voice—speaking, not singing. Her office was on the back of the lot in a little green bungalow.
    I sat in a hardback chair and read aloud a poem that she’d handed me. Then I lay down on the floor and read it again, bouncing a book on what she called my diaphragm. Then I sat in the chair again and read a story from the book. She gave me a hand mirror and I recited sentences over and over in front of it: “I did not want to pet the dear, soft cat.” And: “How. Now. Brown. Cow.”
    All the while she would say things like, “Sit on it, child! Make your voice come up from down there—down
there
. That’s good, that’s good.”
    Her own voice was full and lilting. She said, “My job is to place the voice because a resonant voice records better than a thin one. Now. There is a lot of work to be done here—goodness, a lot! But I promise you that when we’re finished, that Southern accent will be exorcised.”
    I posed for publicity pictures at the portrait studio, swinging a tennis racket, balancing on ice skates, sitting atop a horse and then a bicycle, eating an ice-cream cone, petting a dog. In movement class, Miss Bates went over the proper MGM way to get up out of a chair while keeping the knees together, and how to tuck the bottom when walking. She demonstrated how to make exits and entrances. She said, “An actress has to have a look of authority when she enters a room. Body language is important. Posture is important.”
    She said it was a process, that it would take weeks and weeks of training until we learned how to hold our hands and our heads, and how to know the right angle for the camera. Once we learned, we must keep studying and practicing so that we never lost it. She said there were some actresses who had been at Metro for years who
still
hadn’t learned, which was why they would never be movie stars.
    The last class of my first week was with Sam Katz in the musical department, which was spread across five separate bungalows that Mudge called Tin Pan Alley. The windows to the bungalows were open, and I could hear someone on the piano, and someone else singing scales. Then